Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland

by Carlton Mellick III

  After the raid was over, Talon realized that her husband was also a part of the mutant group. He survived an arrow to the shoulder, and was taken prisoner by the Warriors. He became the property of a wolf woman named Baal, who had a severe grudge against Talon ever since she became leader of the Warrior Knights and Grandma’s right hand soldier.

  After being denied her promotion, Baal didn’t feel she had a place among the Warriors anymore. She was interested in having sex until she turned, so that she could join her big

  sisters in the wild. When she captured her Meat during the raid, Baal only thought it was too perfect that the mutant had been her rival’s husband.

  Talon pleaded with her to let her husband go, she went to Grandma, she did all she could, but Baal would not let him go. One night, Talon went to her husband in the cage. He wanted to hold her, but she wouldn’t let him. She told him what had happened to their sons. She said she killed them without even realizing it. When Talon tried to free her husband so that they could run away together, her husband wouldn’t leave. He said he would rather die than go with her. Even if it was an accident, he could never forgive her.

  Talon’s husband didn’t even look in his wife’s direction as he was raped by Baal. He lay there until the Bitch turned and ripped him to shreds.

  When Nova finishes telling me the story, she looks at me like I’m the biggest asshole in the world for bringing up her family to Talon. I just nod my head at her and wander away.

  I go over to Guy, who is sitting by the fire with Ashley. His face displays complete annoyance as the little girl sleeps with her head in his lap.

  “Is it true?” Guy asks. “Are the Outlanders really planning to attack McDonaldland?”

  “At the end of the month,” I say.

  “After all we’ve done for them?” Guy says.

  “The Mayor wants to be the ruler of McDonaldland, as he once was,” I say.

  Then Guy lowers his voice. “We have to go there and warn them about the attack.”

  “How?”

  “We have to escape,” he says. “There’s no other way.”

  “When?”

  “If they aren’t attacking until the end of the month, then we have time,” he says. “We’ll have to wait until the moment is perfect. We have to make sure we will be able to escape no matter what.”

  Casper and Hyena come to our fire to warm themselves. Guy just nods at me to conclude our conversation. I don’t think I want to leave the Warriors in order to warn McDonaldland of the attack. Because of my mutation, the Fry Guys probably won’t even let me into the walled city. No, Guy is going to have to go by himself. I’m going to stay behind and see if I can’t convince the Warriors to join the fight.

  I search the camp for Nova, but she doesn’t seem to be around. I don’t have a place to sleep for the night and am wondering if she can put me up in her tent. Maybe she has extra blankets or a sleeping bag I can use. Maybe she will let me sleep with her.

  After scouring every inch of the campsite, I figure she must be out in the woods somewhere. I decide to go out and look for her. I’m probably not allowed to leave the camp unescorted, but nobody stops me when I go.

  There’s a lake a quarter mile outside of camp. When I come upon it, I see ripples on the moonlit water. A black form is swimming like a frog from bank to bank and back. I sit down and watch, focusing my eyes to see if it is Nova.

  When the woman steps out of the lake, I realize it is Slayer. She is naked. Her wet fur is pressed flatly to her body so it doesn’t appear that she is coated in fluffy fur at all. She has night-black skin with yellow eyes. The smell of wet dog fills the air as she crosses the beach. A bald naked man comes toward her. He wraps his four arms around her body and slicks his fingers through her wet fur. It is Ronald Krall.

  They just hold each other in the light of the moon, rocking gently back and forth as if they are in a slow dance. Krall does not kiss her or try to seduce her into making love with him. He just gives her closeness and warmth. By the look in Slayer’s eyes, this is something she has needed for a very long time.

  When I go back to the camp, I decide to give up on finding Nova and sleep in the cage. I’ve grown used to sleeping on itchy dried weeds.

  After falling into deep dreams with my face pressed against the bars, I awake to find a blanket wrapped around me. Somebody covered me with it while I was unconscious. It smells like an animal and is covered in red hairs, but it also has a nice perfumed scent that puts me quickly back into a comfortable sleep.

  Days pass. Nova isn’t speaking with me. She isn’t speaking to anyone. I try to talk to her but she always just stares into the distance in the middle of our conversation and then shuts me out. Talon tells me that I just need to give her time.

  I’ve been growing a yeast culture so that I can start making Wolf Juice as soon as possible. I’m hoping I’ll become more accepted by the women once they try their first batch of the wine. The Warriors move camps every day. They have gone on one successful raid, but I didn’t see any of the action. I ride with Guy and Ashley, in a truck near the back of the caravan, where none of the fighting ever takes place.

  I haven’t spoken with Krall in a while. He is usually with Slayer or with one of his patients, so I mostly just hang out with Guy and Ashley. Guy is usually in a bad mood.

  Ashley is drawing a wolf in the dirt with a stick, as Guy and I sit by a campfire eating hamburger buns.

  Guy looks at the drawing in the dirt.

  “What is that supposed to be?” he says in a bothered tone.

  Ashley looks up at him with her dirty face. “It’s a wolf.”

  “Hmmm ...” Guy takes a closer look. “No, that doesn’t look anything like a wolf.”

  Ashley scratches her neck awkwardly.

  Guy sits down next to her. “If this is a wolf, then where are its ears?”

  Ashley points to an “M” shaped scribble at the top of the drawing.

  “I thought that was a bow in its hair,” Guy says. Then he points at the center of the drawing. “You have the nose all wrong, it’s too thin. The eyes are also too high on its face. And why is its head so big compared to its body?”

  “Guy!” I say. “She’s just a kid.”

  “That’s no excuse,” Guy says. “If you don’t point out a child’s flaws to them then they will never improve.”

  He looks down at the girl. “Let me have your stick.”

  Ashley gives it to him.

  “I’ll show you how to draw a wolf,” Guy says.

  He pokes the stick into the mud and tries to draw a circle, it comes out crooked and warped. The tip breaks off.

  “Hmmm ...” he says, examining the end of the stick. “This is not a good tool for drawing with. Wait here. I will find some proper art supplies.”

  Guy gets up and goes to the supply tent, leaving me with Ashley. I see him recruit Apple and a couple other women to dig through their boxes of supplies. When he returns, he has containers of Athena’s old tattoo ink. Nobody claimed it after she died. He also has a pair of scissors, a straw, and a couple of empty cardboard boxes.

  He sits down and cuts up the cardboard box into squares, then piles them up on the ground by his feet. Ashley goes to pick up one of the pieces of cardboard, and Guy pinches a lock of hair on the back of her head and snips it off with the scissors. The little girl jumps away from the cardboard and feels the back of her head.

  Guy stuffs the straw with the lock of Ashley’s hair, then he ties the end up tight with some thread from his blue suit, to keep the hair in place. When he looks up at his creation, I see he has just created a paintbrush.

  “I guess you have some of grandpa in you, too,” I say to Guy.

  Guy doesn’t comment on that. He opens the containers of paint and puts a piece of cardboard on his lap.

  “Now, pay attention,” he tells Ashley. “I’m going to show you how to draw a real wolf.”

  On a stroll outside camp one day, I come across Nova climbing up a tree
. She was always climbing up trees when we were young, but now she can get up the branches incredibly fast with her wolf-like body.

  She sees me looking at her and invites me up. It takes me much longer to climb as high as she is, but I try to get up as quickly as I can. She doesn’t help me when I get up there, just waits patiently on a branch.

  “I’ve been worried about you,” I tell her. “You keep avoiding me.”

  She turns to me and half-smiles. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you feel abandoned.”

  She puts my hand in her lap.

  “I’ve just been wanting to be alone lately,” she says. “I was a different person before you arrived. I had forgotten about a lot of things.”

  She rests her head on my shoulder. “I’m remembering things. Some things I wish would have stayed forgotten. But there’s a lot of good things I’m remembering that have made me happy, especially things about you. I used to have such a crush on you, but I didn’t want anyone to know. We used to climb trees like this and just sit in them for hours. I think those were probably the best times of my life.”

  “I know they were my favorite times,” I say. “McDonaldland was a dreary, depressing place after you left.”

  I wrap two of my arms around her. The scabs on her shoulder are itchy against my skin.

  “That night that we made love,” Nova says. “Thanks for not letting us go all the way. I wanted to. More than anything. I didn’t care about what would happen to me.”

  “I felt guilty for rejecting you,” I say. “I just figured it would have been better if we waited.”

  She nods. “It’s difficult to resist the urge. When I see you walking around the camp, all I want to do is rip your clothes off. Sometimes I want to hurt you for making me feel this way, even though it’s not your fault. That’s one reason why I’ve been ignoring you. I’m worried that I won’t be able to control myself.”

  “You’re fine now,” I tell her.

  “I guess so,” she says.

  As we sit in the tree, holding each other, I notice somebody watching us from afar. It is Pippi, hiding in a tree across the clearing. She is looking at me with an angry red face, as if I’ve somehow betrayed her.

  Nova kisses me on the cheek and then begins to climb out of the tree.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “I need to get away from you for a while,” she says. “I’m starting to get the urge again. We’ll talk later.”

  Once she is on the ground, she cuts through the field, heading in the opposite direction of the camp.

  When I climb out of the tree, Pippi comes up behind me and says, “You’re not supposed to be out of the camp by yourself. Who knows what might happen to you.”

  I turn and face her. The scabby claw marks on her face have become black and infected.

  “You have to walk back with me,” she says.

  I agree.

  As we walk back, Pippi holds her belly and says, “I’m having a baby.”

  “What?” I ask.

  “Grandma said so,” she says.

  “You’re pregnant?”

  She nods her head. “That bitch, Nova, almost caused me to lose it, though, when she cut me so deeply. I think she did it on purpose.”

  The thought of Pippi carrying my child makes me groan and rub my hands against my face.

  “Are you sure you’re pregnant? With my child?”

  “I can feel it,” she says. “I know it’s true.”

  She gets in front of me, stopping me in my path.

  “I want you to raise it with me,” she says. “They say that in the walled city men and women raise their children together. We can do it, too. Out here in the wasteland.”

  “I didn’t want to have a child with you,” I say, backing away from her. “You forced me to have sex with you. You wanted to kill me. You refused to free me even after I helped save your life.”

  “That was before I became pregnant,” she says.

  “Pippi,” I cross my four arms at her, “you’re a self-centered, sadistic, evil Bitch, and I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

  When I say this, she leaps at me. She grabs me by the throat and lifts me off the ground.

  “I can kill you in a second,” she says, her red eyebrows curling at me with anger.

  I look into her yellow eyes, holding her by her furry wrists.

  “Fuck you,” I croak out of my crushed larynx.

  She squeezes tighter. Then tosses me to the ground.

  “If it wasn’t for Nova you would want to have this baby with me,” she says.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I say.

  “I can smell your body releasing sex hormones whenever I’m around you,” she says. “I know your body likes me, even if you don’t.”

  “Huh?” I don’t know what the fuck she’s talking about. “You’re crazy.”

  “You’re denying your instincts to be with me,” she says.

  I get to my feet and she pushes me back down.

  “You’re not meant to be with Nova,” she says. “If I have to kill her to prove it to you, I will.”

  She smacks her tail in my face, as she turns to walk away.

  Guy and Ashley are sitting by a camp fire, painting pictures with their new art supplies. I sit down next to them. I watch them draw for a while. Guy is painting a picture of a hamburger. He is careful to make sure every single detail is correct.

  Guy was always the greatest art student when he was a kid. In art class, you are asked to draw something and are graded on how accurate to real life your drawing is. I didn’t like art class. I’ve always loved to draw, but I like being creative and draw pictures from my imagination. You weren’t allowed to use your imagination in art class in McDonaldland. You had to draw what you were told to draw.

  When Guy is finished, he holds the image outward and nods proudly at his work.

  “What is it?” Ashley says, examining the painting.

  “Can’t you tell?” Guy says. “It’s a Big Mac.”

  “What’s a Big Mac?” the girl asks.

  “You’ve never had a Big Mac?” he asks. “It is only the greatest burger on the McDonald’s menu.”

  “Oh,” Ashley says, even though she doesn’t have a clue about what he’s talking about.

  “So, what are you drawing?” Guy asks the girl.

  She shows him her picture. It is a painting of a man in a blue suit with blond hair. It is actually quite well done for such a young girl.

  “Who is that supposed to be?” he asks.

  “You,” Ashley says.

  “Me?” Guy asks. He takes the cardboard painting from her hand. “Well, I guess it does bear some resemblance to me, but you’re missing the most important thing.”

  Ashley looks up at him. “What?”

  Guy holds out his face toward her. Then he strokes his finger across the hair above his lip.

  “My mustache, of course,” he says.

  “It’s too hard to draw your mustache,” she says.

  “But my mustache is the most prominent part of my body,” he says. “A drawing of me cannot be complete until the mustache is drawn perfectly.”

  He curls his mustache along his finger and the little girl laughs.

  When Ashley goes back to her painting, I say to Guy, “I need to go into the woods to pick berries for the wine I’m supposed to make. Want to come with me?”

  “Certainly,” Guy says.

  After he stands up, he looks back at Ashley,

  “Now, before I get back,” he says, “I want you to draw a mustache on my face. If it’s not perfect I will have you draw ten more mustaches until you get it just right.”

  “No,” she says. “I don’t want to draw ten mustaches.”

  “Then paint it perfectly the first time,” he says.

  She nods her head and goes back to painting hands and shoes on the cardboard.

  We can’t go into the woods without an escort, so Hyena comes with us. I’m not sure w
hat a berry bush looks like, but Grandma assured me they grow out here.

  Hyena isn’t wearing any clothing. She rarely does, except when she’s on raids. Many of the wolf women seem to walk around topless, probably because their fur is too warm for clothes. While walking with her, I notice that the spots in her fur and the blackness of her face don’t look to be naturally occurring. It is as if she has dyed her skin and hair to look this way. But her tail, it does look natural. It does look like the tails of hyenas I have seen in books. Perhaps it is possible that she is turning into a hyena. The only one of her kind.

  Before she notices I am staring at her, I turn to my brother.

  “She seems to have warmed up to you,” I tell Guy.

  When he gives me a confused face, I say, “Ashley.”

  “She’s a satisfactory kid,” Guy says.

  “Is that a compliment or an insult?” I ask.

  “It is not an insult,” he says.

  “You probably miss your family,” I say.

  He grunts in agreement at me, then goes silent for a while. Maybe half an hour passes.

  When he breaks the silence, he says, “Molly’s dying.”

  “What?” I ask.

  He walks a ways before he explains, trying to get a bit ahead of Hyena so that she doesn’t listen in.

  “She was diagnosed earlier this year,” he says. “Stage 4 Lymphatic Cancer. She has only months to live.”

  I’ve never liked Molly, but this is tragic news to me. Guy is never allowed to leave the wolf women. His wife is dying. What are to become of his children? What is to become of Guy knowing that his wife will die, leaving his children all alone? And with the attack on McDonaldland coming, I can see why Guy wants to escape and get back home as soon as possible.

  I look at my brother with a sad, apologetic face, but when my eyes meet his I do not see sorrow. He is giving me a look of readiness. He wants us to use this moment to escape.